


Reverb

by cruentum



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: writerinadrawer, WriterInADrawer 4.10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-26
Updated: 2010-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-11 06:31:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruentum/pseuds/cruentum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story is part of a short-duration writing contest.  Please do not comment on this story, positively or negatively, until this notice is removed.  If you are interested in this contest please visit http://community.livejournal.com/writerinadrawer.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Reverb

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of a short-duration writing contest. Please do not comment on this story, positively or negatively, until this notice is removed. If you are interested in this contest please visit http://community.livejournal.com/writerinadrawer.

Jack didn't bring ice cream and Ianto didn't bring flowers to the end of the world. The ice cream was melting from the cone onto the dashboard of the old red Fiat and the flowers were floating in the Bristol Channel.

"Should've brought guns," Jack said.

"Should've brought brains."

"Zombies got it." Jack laughed and knocked against his skull, much to the eyeroll of Ianto. Ianto pulled out his spoon and made a digging-in gesture, always prepared. They were hiking through the Welsh countryside, more Welsh, less countryside, while the sky was burning a deep red on the horizon.

The end of the world wasn't supposed to happen in the twenty-first century, but when you hopped on the strands of time and pulled them tight here and unraveled them there to bring people back from the dead, well, shit happened.

Jack had his own little world of meat puppets now that answered to Ianto and Steven and Estelle and Alex and a few lovers whose names he'd forgotten (the pieces of paper, sadly, were also in the aforementioned Fiat they'd left at the coast. People didn't take kindly to honeymoon fucks that kept addressing them as 'hey, you').

"Don't start with my dick. I think dicks aren't sanitary," Ianto was saying from a few feet ahead.

The end of the world should always start with sex and possibly end with sex, but it didn't when you were fucking someone whose life was wrapped in lists, order and scheduled chaos on the weekends.

"I'm not going to eat you."

"But you'll survive me." Ianto held up the spoon to the bursting sun behind them, then shrugged first one arm out of his shirt, switched the spoon to the other hand, and shrugged the other arm out of his shirt, leaving the shirt for Jack to pick up as a souvenir. "Should've brought a knife. I'll be roasted. Should be good."

"I didn't think this would end with me cutting you up."

Ianto stopped, scratched at his chest as he cocked his head at Jack. "Funny. I didn't either."

"Bad planning. Besides--Kuru." Jack replied, half triumphant, then too sweaty to be triumphant as he shrugged out of his clothes entirely.

"End of the world." Ianto drummed his knuckles against the curve of the spoon bit of the spoon. "I'd murder for that ice cream."

Something exploded behind them, probably the Fiat, and Ianto picked up the pace. Neither of them was keen to burn alive, even if both of them knew that running by foot was hardly going to help them.

Jack was, admittedly, already trying to figure out how he'd hop out and where he'd hop back into the array of strings and whether the next versions of the people populating his life could be a little closer to the originals.

Ianto's come had tasted off the last three or four times, even after he'd fed him enough pineapple to turn his tongue raw from vitamin C. The details made the difference between cheap copies that were hardly better than rubber versions called Hot Betty and something close to the original of dead and dying in his arms.

Ianto was toppling out of his trousers, sweat running down his body. Where their Fiat had been, woods were burning now.

"My first was a girl called..." Ianto squinted into mid-distance then slowly turned to Jack. "I don't remember, but she gave better head than you."

"Harsh." Jack laughed and grabbed for Ianto, fingers slick on his arse as he pulled him close, rocked against him. He was hard, and Ianto was, too, only slightly panting now, hot and burning up. Jack was faring little better, but the end of the world (unraveling of strings, oops) could at least end with sex now, with Jack's hand wrapped around Ianto's dick, when this version of the world had started with two weeks of silent treatment after miraculous recovery from the shock of the 456.

"Let me fuck you," Ianto muttered against his lips, burning up in his arms. Jack let Ianto push him to his knees and his cock into Jack, and they rutted away as the grass was turning brown underneath Jack's hands and knees. He rubbed it between his fingers.

"I'll start with your tummy," Jack said, and reached behind him. "It'll be all lean."

Ianto laughed mid-thrust, mid-thrust again, like a bit of a broken record. "Then you'll die of overdose like Seabrook. Turned mad by how delicious and unattainable good human meat is."

"Can get it any time," Jack replied.

"You-"

Then the world ended, and it wasn't that pretty exactly, and it wasn't like Jack had time to feast on Ianto.

He existed in the void between universes, made of the stuff that turned you into a radioactive energizer bunny when you plopped out the other side of one of the layers of string matter. He was pretty sure he was the only thing there, he and his thoughts filled with faces and random characteristics of people from a few lifetimes ago. Time didn't exist in the void. Only, well, he existed in the void. He was the void, and when daleks spilled in every now and then, he got very crowded with a lot of metal.

Being spat out on the other side of the void meant he'd just spent infinity+1 tying strings into knots.

"Jack!" Gwen said, when he waded out of the Bristol Channel (he buried faint hopes that he'd find his pages from the last universe floating with flowers and roasted Ianto in the waves).

"Gwen!" he said, because he always had stock images stored away somewhere.

A world with Torchwood, check, Cardiff, check, Gwen, check, it was the one that felt most comfortable. Internal countdown check, it ticked away to the left of his heart just so he'd know when to grab one of them and make a run for it from the end of the world.

"Ianto done yet?" Jack asked, because Ianto was always doing something, hence could always be done doing something.

"Down in the archives. We were monitoring your dive, did you find the egg?"

"Nothing down there," Jack said and glanced back at the channel.

The countdown was running faster in that endless beepbeepbeepbeep next to his heart, and Jack was getting a bit tired of the routine reinventions. He'd have settled down, no end of the world, regular sex and conversation, people whose names he remembered even when he'd skipped them a time or two down the road.

And some universes did better without the Doctor and his disapproval.

Most of the time Jack's 'you don't get to come in here' warning sign on the entry to his SIM world didn't stop him, but a chap could try, yeah?

"You're wet," Ianto said when Jack trudged down into the archives.

Ianto looked the same as always and little like rubber Hot Betty and even less like roasted human from the last go-around.

"Water," Jack said and planted himself squarely on Ianto's desk, letting his soaking trousers stain paper to mush. He had to admit he might have gone overboard with the water after the last end of the world.

"I see that."

Ianto pulled his glasses from not quite under Jack's ass and folded them up. Glasses. Jack could come to appreciate glasses. The spoon before had been fine, the necklace before that, the stopwatch sometime long far down the road before that.

"Any sign of the end of the world?" Jack asked as he pulled Ianto closer by his tie and kissed him.

Good universe, Jack liked this one. At least until it unraveled the next time and left him stranded to find a new ride for a while.

Ianto's spit tasted the same, check, Ianto's dick got hard the same, check, Ianto was breathing, living and all there, check. Jack would be happy to ignore the countdown for the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of a short-duration writing contest. Please do not comment on this story, positively or negatively, until this notice is removed. If you are interested in this contest please visit http://community.livejournal.com/writerinadrawer.


End file.
